Last year, the international affairs think tank Atlantic Council made an interesting new hire. Keen to draw on ideas about the future of war from various areas of speculative fiction, the organisation – which advises on global security policy and holds meetings for heads of state and military leaders – announced that game designer Dave Anthony would become a nonresident fellow in its Brent Scowcroft Center. Anthony was, until that point, a writer on the Call of Duty: Black Ops titles.

It will probably seem odd to some people: a writer from gaming’s answer to a Michael Bay popcorn flick, notionally advising policy makers on the future of armed conflict. But Treyach, the creators of the Call of Duty: Black Ops titles, is very serious about its research. Forthcoming title Black Ops 3 is set 30 years in the future, and involves high-tech warfare between two new international collectives – Winslow Accord and the Common Defence Pact. Cybernetic enhancement, bio-augmentation and direct neural interfacing between the brains of soldiers and computer networks are all part of the story. And Treyarch claims that all these elements come from stringent analysis of real-life scientific and military advancements.

As the game’s campaign director Jason Blundell puts it, “If you think about Treyach, and the number of people we have here, there’s probably only a few other institutions in the world that have spent this amount of time cross-referencing the different technologies in this sector.”

So here are some of the key technologies and concepts being explored in the game – and where Treyarch got its sometimes very scary ideas.

United Nations meeting on Lethal autonomous weapons

In the game, players will be facing both intelligent battle robots and fully automated weapons systems, both of which have been given autonomous kill orders – in other words, the ability to target and engage enemies without human input.

It’s something governments and major international organisations are already concerned about. In May 2014, the United Nations hosted a four-day event in Geneva to discuss the ethical ramifications of lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS).

“The people employed to make policy decisions around the world are taking this stuff very seriously,” says Blundell, who told us that Treyarch has spoken to military advisors on this subject. “There’s already an autonomous weapons system in place for military convoys – it’s a simple gun on top of a vehicle, but if it detects a sniper shot, it can use its sensors to triangulate the origin of the bullet and fire in that direction. Right now, there has to be a human to push the button, but that is a trivial step to remove.”

To Blundell, the big facilitator for LAWS is the huge reduction in costs for developing autonomous systems. “With cheap manufacturing, including 3D printing, and the idea of generic artificial intelligence, we’re not far away,” he says. “We touch on this in our story, but it’s becoming cheap enough to manufacture this technology, the chips are so disposable, that you can create autonomous bots very cheaply - and these can be used on the battlefield.”

“From now on the evolution of technology will be exponential. It will move faster than legislation can keep up with, it will become cheaper and it will be pervasive. You hear examples of people landing drones on the White House lawn - they’re so cheap, you can go to a shop, buy one and fly it out there. The law can’t move fast enough to prevent that. So when you start talking about bio-augmentation and about changing the capabilities of humans, these are important moral questions, because you know the military will be at the forefront of those experiments.”
Bio-augmentation and brain-computer interfacing – the BRAIN initiative

Bio-augmentation or human enhancement, involves the use of various neurotechnologies, including neural implants, to improve the performance of the human mind and body. It’s a key theme in Black Ops 3, with the player joining a team of spec-ops soldiers who have all been augmented to allow them to run faster, jump higher and process battlefield information more quickly. Each soldier is fitted with a Direct Neural Interface (DNI), a sub-dermal technology that connects directly into their brain and spinal column and links them to a computer system. In the game, this manifests as a “tactical mode” allowing co-op players to share information such as the position of enemy soldiers or key objective points.

According to Treyarch, the major inspiration here comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the section of the US Department of Defence responsible for emerging military technologies. “They have a biotechnology office,” says Mark Lamia, studio head. “Its purpose – and this has been literally stated – is to explore the intersection of biology and physical sciences. It starts with advanced prosthetics and controlling artificial limbs or treating neurological symptoms of people with PTSD. They’re talking about direct neural interfaces to help control those things, but you can see how you get to our fiction very easily. It’s not that far out.”

“The Obama administration has commissioned a Brain Research Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, backed by $300m in funding and supported by Darpa - it is a programme researching a reliable neural interface technology. It’s publicly known that the purpose of this is not fully understood. Some of these things start in a medical setting, then go to commercial, but who knows where it goes next?”

In Black Ops 3, players will be able to customise their soldiers with new cybernetic systems, giving them access to enhanced movement abilities such as higher jumps and faster sprinting. Like Sledgehammer, the studio behind last year’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Treyarch has looked into current developments into cybernetic enhancement (the use of machine and computer components to replace human body parts) and robotic exoskeletons.

Exoskeleton systems have been used to help paraplegics gain mobility and to aid Korean dock workers in moving heavy objects. Japanese company Cyberdyne, specialises in medical and rehabilitation exoskeleton research, producing its famed Hal (Hybrid Assistive Limb) robotic technology. But of course, the military has also been working on this sort of concept for over 50 years, and the latest example is the United States Special Operations Command’s Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (Talos) which offers physical enhancement as well as ballistics protection and body monitoring. There’s also Lockheed Martin and its HULC program, “a completely un-tethered, hydraulic-powered anthropomorphic exoskeleton that provides users with the ability to carry loads of up to 200 pounds for extended periods of time and over all terrains.”

“We’re starting to integrate this technology into our lives in very interesting ways,” says Blundell. “But as we get more comfortable, that next step isn’t too far out.”

Mind reading and thought control

Black Ops 3 envisions a future in which every soldier’s battlefield experience is beamed instantly to a central control station and to other soldiers – but not via helmet cameras, by direct connection to their brains and optic systems. Once again, this is something already being considered by military researchers.

“Darpa has a programme called Silent Talk,” says Blundell. “It is exploring mind-reading technologies with devices that allow it to pick up electrical signals inside soldiers’ brains and then send them over the internet.” In 2008, Darpa received an initial $4m in funding to start researching the concept of an EEG helmet that could pick up and transmit brain waves, allowing soldiers to communicate with each other via thought alone – a major advantage amid the chaos of battle. “It’d be radio without a microphone,” said Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist overseeing the program to Time magazine. “Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.”

Another aspect that has fascinated Treyarch is the user of brain-computer interfaces to give pilots more intuitive control of their planes, or to allow the remote control of robot soldiers. “For some people, this may all sound ludicrous,” says Lamia. “But last week I read an article talking about a fighter pilot controlling a plane through thoughts.” Indeed, in a recent project at the University of Pittsburgh’s Human Engineering Research Laboratory, a quadriplegic woman was able to control a simulation of a F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, with her mind. The same research has also produced a mind-controlled robot arm, which allowed highly coordinated movement.

What Darpa is interested in, though, is the idea of battlefield telepresence. We’re already seeing drones being piloted remotely by human controllers, but a future step could well be remote-controlled robotic soldiers. In 2013, part of Darpa’s $2.8bn budget was allocated to a project entitled Avatar, after the James Cameron movie. The agency said at the time: “The program will develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bipedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.”

Darpa already has a potential robotic host for the initiative. Petman (seen in the video above) is a humanoid robot developed by Boston Dynamics and funded by Darpa. The company’s stated goal is to test chemical-protection clothing, and perhaps to develop robots that can help in disasters such as the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown. But many observers have seen the almost inevitable military implications: in 2013, former intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Douglas A. Pryer penned an essay on the rise of killer robots, while Human Rights Watch has written an extensive report warning of a future in which robotic soldiers, either remotely controlled or autonomous, are effectively employed as battlefield terminators.

The geopolitics of resource scarcity

In the background, global climate change is set to play a big part in Black Ops 3. As water becomes more scarce, countries align to protect and exploit natural resources. Consequently, you have powerful new factions in the game, such as the Nile River Coalition, which seeks to control the flow of water. “We’ve looked closely at the geopolitical landscape,” says Lamia. “We’ve taken direction from where global climate change has had a dramatic impact, especially in terms of the scarcity of resources, and we’ll tell that story as part of this world.”

The Nile has, of course, been a major source of geopolitical tension between Egypt and neighbouring countries, and experts say this is set to increase in the 21st century as basic resources become more scare and valuable. The really worrying thing about the future that Treyarch has envisaged after years of reading up on military research is not that there will be robots fighting wars, but that there will be robots fighting wars over access to water.

A US technology firm has developed a drone that is able to aim and fire at enemies while flying in mid-air.
The Tikad drone, developed by Duke Robotics, is armed with a machine-gun and a grenade launcher.
The gun can be fired only by remote control, and is designed to reduce military casualties by cutting the number of ground troops required.
But campaigners warn that in the wrong hands, it will make it easier to kill innocent people.
The Tikad drone, available for private sale at an undisclosed price, has won a security innovation award from the US Department of Defense, and there is interest from several military forces around the world, including Israel, reports Defense One.
According to the firm's website, two of the three co-founders of Duke Robotics worked for the Israel Defense Forces and the third at Israel Aerospace Industries.
'Violent force'
"As a former Special Mission Unit commander, I have been in the battlefield for many years," said CEO Raziel Atuar.
"Over the last few years, we have seen how the needs of our troops in our battlefield have changed."

However, robotics expert Professor Noel Sharkey expressed concern that gun-toting drones could make it easier to kill innocent people.
"Big military drones traditionally have to fly thousands of feet overhead to get to targets, but these smaller drones could easily fly down the street to apply violent force," he told the BBC.
"This is my biggest worry since there have been many legal cases of human-rights violations using the large fixed-wing drones, and these could potentially result in many more."

For the past decade, Prof Sharkey has been campaigning against killer robots, which are fully autonomous, computer-powered weapons that would be able to track and select targets without human supervision.
Together with the Campaign To Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of over 60 international NGOs including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Nobel Women's Initiative, Sharkey has been lobbying the United Nations to ban autonomous weapons.
However, the machine-gun on board the Duke Robotics device still has to be controlled remotely by a human operator.
Copycat fears
According to Prof Sharkey, some US military officials are concerned that although the US might follow the laws of war, terrorists could easily look at drone innovations and copy the idea to kill innocent people.
"We already know that Islamic State is using drones laden with explosives to kill people. What's to stop them from getting their hands on this? Copying has not been possible with big military drones, but once you get the idea that you can strap automatic weapons onto one and operate it remotely, that's very much easier," he said.
"This type of weapon is another dangerous step towards the development of fully autonomous weapons that could hunt down targets and kill them without human

this is where we see the context of the drones now. Once they have a set of these drones with functional AI, they will be able to carpet bomb the mass population with chemtrails and bioweapons with no paper trails or a single witness to the act. Imagine a compartmentalised unit with AI drones that has a brief to carpet bomb the country with a weaponised chemtrail that will kill off a sizeable percentage of the population. All with inbuilt plausible deniability....

A Silicon Valley startup company called Pyka is developing an autonomous (self-driving) plane to meet the burgeoning demand for planes that rely on artificial intelligence and sensor technology to replace co-pilots and possibly even pilots with remote operators or robots on commercial flights. The company has already produced a 400-pound plane that can take off and land in a small area (just 90 feet) and fly autonomously. However, while regulators conduct multiple tests before allowing human commercial flights, the company has hit on the brainwave of using the plane for another lucrative application: dousing agricultural land with toxic chemical pesticides.

Tech Crunch explains:

Pyka has developed a placeholder business doing crop dusting in New Zealand. That helps it earn $600 per hour while logging the hours necessary to prepare for the human transportation market. Crop dusting alone is a $1.5 billion business in the U.S.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail claims that using an autonomous plane like the Pyka Plane makes “agricultural chemical application safer, faster and more precise.” The manufacturers have engineered the plane to execute such chemical application at high speed (over 70 miles an hour) and very close to the ground, at heights which would normally be dangerous. Though the plane is likely to be exorbitantly expensive, Pyka believes this expense will be offset by its “extremely fast and affordable application” capabilities. (Related: Learn why the toxic chemicals used in conventional agriculture are so dangerous at Chemicals.news.)

In theory, the concept behind the plane seems sound. The Mail reports:

The plane’s onboard sensors allow it to self-regulate its position, flying precise paths while spraying at the right times. This allows the plane to compensate if there’s wind and drift, leading to using less chemicals per acre while also decreasing accidental exposure of chemicals to other areas.

While pesticide drift from conventional spraying is a big problem, Pyka is missing the point: Spraying toxic chemicals more efficiently doesn’t negate the fact that they are toxic in the first place. What is needed is the eradication of pesticides, not the more efficient application thereof.

For years independent media leaders like Mike Adams of Natural News have been warning about the dangers of such pesticides, including Monsanto’s Roundup, which contains over 50 percent glyphosate. (Related: How Monsanto’s Roundup unleashes chemical violence against women and children.)

Big Agri came out with guns blazing against such allegations, insisting that glyphosate – and by extension Roundup – had been proven to be safe in countless scientific studies.

Then, in March 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) issued a report entitled IARC Monographs Volume 112: evaluation of five organophosphate insecticides and herbicides, which turned the agricultural world on its head and left Monsanto with serious egg on its face.

The report findings stated:

The herbicide glyphosate and the insecticides malathion and diazinon were classified as probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A). [Emphasis added]

With an increasing number of studies linking glyphosate to the cancer non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Monsanto is now facing a crippling barrage of lawsuits from plaintiffs and their families whose lives have been destroyed by chemical pesticides.

So, you see, searching for “safer” and more effective ways to dump these chemicals on farmland is not the solution. The only way forward is to stop using chemical pesticides and throw our collective weight behind the growing organic movement worldwide.

A drone reportedly has been used to try to lure kids off an elementary school playground in a bizarre story out of Ohio. A letter was issued to school parents by Windemere principal Megan Lee-Wilfong on Monday, warning of what may be an attempted abduction, WKYC CBS reported.

The incident occurred at the Windemere Community Learning Center a school in Akron, Ohio.
“Three to four times, they have seen a drone up over the playground,” principal Megan Lee-Wilfong told WJW.

Lee-Wilfong states that several witnesses – kids and adults – have claimed the voice even tried to lure kids off the playground.

“They shared with me that this drone had some type of voice capability and that it was actually communicating with the kids that were here playing, so it was talking to them,” Principal Megan Lee-Wilfong said. “Even if I am not here on the evenings or on the weekends, they are still my students so I wanted to make sure they were OK.”
According to the local news report, the drone operator was trying to lure kids to a local dollar store blocks away from the playground.
“The drone was trying to interact with them… Wanted to see if they would meet them at a dollar store which is about three blocks away from where the school is,” Daniel Rambler, Akron Public Schools Director of Student Support Services and Security told WKYC.
Luckily, none of the kids took the bait and instead reported the sighting to school staff who say they are now on high alert.

The drone has only been sighted at night and on the weekends when school is not in session, but staff are worried that the drone may return during school hours.
The school district is further warning parents to have an adult accompany children to the playground and to have the “stranger danger” talk with their children.
“We’ve always known of stranger danger, and we teach it to kids constantly, but it’s now not just people, but things,” Rambler said. “Make sure you go over with your kids, what are your expectations if your kids are on the playground and somebody comes up to them, what is your expectation of what they do. Same thing if there’s a remote control device that does that.”

The story gets stranger as Daily Mail reported that “consumer devices which allow their operators to have a real-time conversation with another via the drone, as if it were a flying telephone, does not appear to be publicly available.”
Lt. Rick Edwards of the Akron Police Department told Fox News that no police report regarding the drone has been filed, and no one has called and complained about the drone.
Mark Williamson, director of marketing communications at Akron Public Schools has also stated that there is no empirical evidence of the drone.

“There’s not any evidence of the drone, like a picture, that we’re aware of. We also can’t verify what it said,” Williamson said.

The CIA works for the bloodline -- planet of the crossing -- crime family syndicate. I mean, when all of that information about Hillary trying to cover up her crimes in Hati came out, she should have already been given the electric chair by now. For those that don't know, not only was she involved in actual child trafficking and missing children, she was caught red handed giving pardons to people doing the same thing. Then sending out the murder orders to the few brave souls that tried to investigate it FOR REAL. On top of that fact that 10s of millions donated to the Clinton foundation that was suppose to go the Hati, never made it there b/c she has been using that money for personal use.

What do they do?? They take ORDERS from the Clintons b/c they are so high up. The CIA is comprised of the laziest, filthiest, rat [email protected] we have in America.

They have more then drones to protect themselves. They are working on robots to replace physical warriors. Not to say .... that's not in the process of being taken care of by positive ETs.

Oh....and let me spill more beans about the CIA.......so the Mason I have been talking about lately in another thread.....is trafficking children/people for a gang. What gang?? THE CIA!!!

.....and yes I did figure out about the cocaine. No thank you. No thank you!!! Is it maddening that they try to tempt people with cocaine or that they troll the lives of people like me?? There is no longer much of a line between sold out masons, Saturn worship, and the CIA. The CIA is 100% part of the military industrial complex. They are gang with an official title so they can get work done outside the realm of what normal lodges do.

Like they said themselves (about me and my spiritual twin), i'm the stronger of the two. The most psychic. The most everything. So, take that vampire lifestyle and shove it up your miserable a$$. lol I know, he will eventually be told the news. lol